by James Armstrong

I used to cast an evil eye on people who left their car running, but in light of yesterday’s Austin snow storm I must confess that after my car warmed up I left it running for 15 more minutes just to spite climate change.

In the interest of full disclosure, our definition of a snow storm is much more relaxed than our compatriots in the North and West. My mother, who hails from the state of New Mexico, kept lampooning the local media for covering the weather like some freakish occurrence.

But yesterday, as I paused to reflect on the climate change debate, there was something amiss. It wasn’t quite a feeling that the straw had broken the camel’s back; more like the ice had snapped the tree’s trunk.

It’s hard to believe that it was only two years ago that Jim Hightower, our refreshingly gruff former agriculture commissioner, told an environmental conference that thinking of global warming as a farce was “bull----.”

Well, the pooper-scooper must be on break because all that stuff is adding up.

In January 2009, according to the Rasmussen tracking polls, 44 percent of American voters said climate change was a result of man’s activity while 41 percent thought it was a natural occurring event. One year later, after the numbers shifted throughout the summer, 37 percent blamed man and 50 percent blamed Mother Nature.

You can diagnose the drop as a typical realignment against an incumbent president, a backlash in the wake of Climategate or a lack of concern due to the bad economy. Nevertheless, to borrow a word my libertarian friends are fond of using, this issue is experiencing “blowback.”

The answer might have more to do with marketing than with any recent events. Prior to that very summer in 2009, the call to action on climate change was always in the spirit of volunteerism. Cut down on electricity use, walk or bike instead of drive and take advantage of tax credits for green cars. The public could regulate their environmental footprint as their conscience dictated.

Then came Cap and Trade. Sure such legislation had been discussed in Congress before, but such bills were always voted down comfortably. As it passed the House of Representatives and advanced to the Senate, I’d venture a guess that when people read about it they felt like the campaign had escalated from a volunteer effort into an outright draft. When a delivery man can tell me exactly how high his electricity rates would go up if Cap and Trade became law, you know the political winds have shifted.

Ronald Reagan famously collected jokes Soviet citizens told about their government as it slipped into the ash heap of history. After yesterday, Austinites should keep their ears open for new material, because once a cause has become a punch line its decline and fall is already underway.